I wonder if this is something that 'we need a leader, not a reader'
anti-intellect candidate Herman Cain will notice? Or is it yet another
instance where he will be caught unprepared and inadequate when faced
with a challenging (rather than softball) question? I'm betting that if
he hasn't yet, Cain will be paying someone soon to read for him. Or to
him.

From MSNBC news and news services:

Libyan commander: Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam arrested

Younger Gadhafi captured with two aides while trying to cross into Niger, commander says

NBC, msnbc.com and news services

updated 2 hours 28 minutes ago

breaking news

TRIPOLI, Libya — Moammar
Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam was captured in a southern Libyan city
along with two of his aides who were trying to smuggle him out of the
country, a militia commander said on Saturday.

Bashir
al-Tlayeb of the Zintan brigades said that Seif al-Islam was caught in
the desert town of Obari, near the southern city of Sabha about 400
miles south of Tripoli. He didn't elaborate on how Seif al-Islam was
captured, but said that he was brought to the city of Zintan, the home
of one of the largest revolutionary brigades in Libya.
Al-Tlayeb said that it would be up to the Libya's ruling National
Transitional Council to decide on where the former Libyan leader would
be tried.
However, NBC News reported that according to sources, al-Islam would be
tried in Libya, not handed over to the International Criminal Court.
Al-Tlayeb also said that there was still no information about wanted
former intelligence director Abdullah Senoussi or where he is located.
Libya's interim justice minister told Reuters that the younger Gadhafi was in good health.Interactive: Gadhafi's children (on this page) Seif al-Islam is the last of Moammar Gadhafi's sons to remain unaccounted for.

Secret negotiations over a surrender?

Born in 1972, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi is the oldest of seven children of Moammar and Safiya Gadhafi.
He drew Western favor in previous years by touting himself as a
liberalizing reformer but then staunchly backed his father in his brutal
crackdown on rebels in the regime's final days.
Seif had gone underground after Tripoli fell to revolutionary forces. Story: Libya: Gadhafi son offers to surrender to Hague The
International Criminal Court had earlier said that it was in indirect
negotiations with a son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi about
his possible surrender for trial. This is a breaking news story. Please check again for more updates. NBC News, msnbc.com staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Today I'm indulging my enjoyment of the sciences. Clean, safe drinking water is a problem world wide. It is a huge problem after natural disasters; the problems in Japan after their tsunami damage is just one example that comes to mind. Water supplies also remain a problem for countries that have experienced the ravages of war, like Iraq, which destroyed so much of their infrastructure.

So this is about more than JUST science; it also has ramifications for not only economics but also diplomacy. This is something that could be hugely influential in helping to prevent disease, and the sickness that goes with abject poverty in third world countries.

This is wondrous, this is the future. We should be noticing.

Also from MSNBC.com:

Plasmas sterilize water cheaply

Steve Graves

A
brief spark in air produces a low-temperature plasma of partially
ionized and dissociated oxygen and nitrogen that will diffuse into
nearby liquids or skin, where they can kill microbes by generating
reactive chemicals.

By John Roach

Ionized
plasmas like those in neon signs and plasma TVs can sterilize water and
make it antimicrobial as well, according to researchers studying the
potential to use inexpensive plasma-generating devices to create sterile
water in developing countries, disasters areas, and battlefields.
Plasmas are the fourth state of matter
after solid, liquid, and gas. They are formed when gases are energized,
stripping atoms of their electrons to create a collection of free
moving electrons and ions.
Researchers have known plasmas will
kill bacteria in water. Now, a new experiment shows that water treated
with plasma killed all the E. coli bacteria that were added to it within
a few hours of treatment and still killed 99.9 percent of the bacteria
added after it sat for a week.
The ionized gas, or plasma, creates
various chemical like ozone, nitrogen oxide, and other radicals. When
the plasma is put next to water, "the chemicals diffuse to the water,
they absorb in the in water, and they have various reactions in the
water," David Graves, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, explained to me today.
The
chemical soup includes well-known antimicrobials such as nitrates and
nitrites as well as hydrogen peroxide. Bacteria on our tongues, for
example, convert nitrates in leafy green vegetables to nitrites.
However,
the concentration of these known antimicrobials dropped over the course
of the experiment, yet the water was still able to kill off E. coli
that were added to it seven days after the plasma treatment. "So it
seems like there is probably chemistry going on that we don't know about
yet."
The finding is published this month in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
Graves envisions using inexpensive, spark-plug-like plasma generating
devices to sterilize water for medical purposes in natural disaster
zones or deep in the wilderness. Whether or not the water is safe to
drink, however, is unknown.
"It is possible," Graves said, noting
that breast milk, for example, is loaded with nitrates and nitrites. But
before he recommends the plasma-treated water for drinking, safety
tests need to be conducted.
In earlier experiments, the team also
found that plasma can kill dangerous proteins and lipids such as prions —
the infectious agents that cause mad cow disease — that standard
sterilization processes leave behind, according a news release on the findings.
For more information, check out the release and paper.

Also not about firearms, but interesting, and shows a common bias on the Right

This is about energy, but it is also about a larger issue which is
annoys me. There have been a number of people on the right who
misrepresent science and grants.

Sarah Palin did it when she made stump speeches ridiculing fruit fly research that she was too stupid and ignorant to understand, and characteristically, too lazy to research before running her mouth.

Tom Coburn did it in April of this year, when he wrongly and unfairly
criticized grants made by the National Science Foundation in a report
that got a lot of attention, but which did not receive the appropriate
critical thinking that would have revealed the flaws and errors it
contained. The anti-science right does that sort of thing regularly.
An example of the coverage that did not receive the appropriate credit
to DIScredit Coburn was this one :

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has long
railed against wasteful government spending and urged his colleagues to
shrink the federal budget. His latest salvo is a 73-page report
released today that accuses the National Science Foundation
(NSF) of mishandling nearly $3 billion. The document follows a
well-trod path of asserting that a federal research agency is
funding trivial and duplicative research in addition to exercising
inadequate oversight of existing programs.
But the report, TheNational Science Foundation: Under the Microscope,
is itself filled with errors and questionable analyses, say
science lobbyists. "The bottom line is that attacks on 'silly grants'
are silly and irresponsible," says Howard Silver, executive director of
the Consortium of Social Science Associations and former chair
of the Coalition for National Science Funding, which advocates for
larger NSF budgets.
Silver points to Coburn's criticism of several NSF awards in the social sciences as a prime example.

and

The biggest "savings" that Coburn
identifies is actually a misreading of federal statutes, according to
NSF officials. The report accuses NSF of failing to recover
$1.7 billion in "expired grants," that is, money grantees didn't spend
in the course of doing their research. But that's not true,
says NSF. The number reflects all the money that has been obligated for
multiyear grants, and the amount (as of last fall) drops as
researchers tap their accounts over the duration of their
project. "It's being used for exactly the purpose for which it was
intended," explains one budget official who requested
anonymity.
Only a tiny amount--roughly $30 million a year--is actually left on the
table once a researcher has finished his or her project. And that
amount is returned each year to the Treasury. "You'd think a
U.S. senator would understand how the federal government funds
multiyear research projects," says one lobbyist.

There
were hearings held, as a result of Coburn's report. I was never able
to find any results from that hearing that supported Cobur's
conclusions. It seems that despite the shrimp on a treadmill videos
going viral that when examined by Congressional hearings
, rationally, NONE of Coburn's claims of waste proved true. I find it
sad, but not really very surprising that the anti-science assumptions
and attitudes seem to mostly fall along partisan lines. It is a shame there was no comparable scrutiny of the wasteful expenditures of Senator Coburn in preparing his bogus, flawed hatchet job report, or the cost of hearings which generated NOTHING of value for the taxpayer money they cost.

It is a shame, that there is no similar inquiry which challenges the expenditure by Senator Coburn's office in generating the flawed report, or the cost of the hearings which were a waste of time and money...unless you count the entertainment value of political theater.

Those expenditures produced nothing of value in return for the expenditures, unlike the results of the NSF grants.
I don't see the right asking the very important question of their
propaganda pushers, the question 'is that true'. There is a lot of
political theater by both sides, but the right seems to have a more 'red
meat' audience, and to engage in more factual inaccuracy and outright
dishonesty.

So, I wonder in that context, how the following will be treated in the media.

The
U.S. government is giving a nearly half-million dollar grant to a beer
maker in Alaska that aims to install a first-of-its-kind boiler that
is fueled entirely by spent grain.
All brewers are confronted with mountains of spent grains — mostly
barley. Many get rid of the waste by routing it to farmers for animal
feed, a noble service that can help grow a steak to accompany your fine
ale.
For the Alaskan Brewing Co.
in Juneau, this has involved an added step, since the closest market
for its grains is a long-distance, boat-ride away in Seattle.
To keep the grains from decomposing during transport, the brewery first
dries them in a machine that is heated by a biomass burner that uses
about 50 percent of the spent grain as a fuel source.
Now, with the help of the $458,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy for America program, the brewery is installing a machine that will use the dried grain to power a biomass steam boiler.
"The new boiler will eliminate the brewery's use of oil in the grain
drying process and displace more than half of the fuel needed to create
process steam," the company said in an emailed statement.
Brewers use process team, for example, to boil the sugary water called
wort, created when sugars are extracted from the grains, a key step in
brewing beer.
The boiler will cut the brewery's overall energyuse from oil, and corresponding carbon emissions, by more than 70 percent, according to Alaskan Brewing Co.
The system also eliminates the need to ship the grain south to cattle
around Seattle, Ashley Johnston, a company spokeswoman, told me.
The grant is one of eight announced Thursday by the agriculture department, all of which are aimed at helping rural businesses to lower energy costs so that they can stay competitive and, potentially, hire more workers.
In total, 52 projects received over $31 million in grants and loan note
guarantees through the program this year. The grants can finance up to
25 percent of a project's cost.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The following story raises some very deep and troubling questions about our current Supreme Court Justices. The LA Times Story below is not the only instance where the Justices appear to have relationships, including financially benefiting from activities, that compromise their appearance of propriety, as shown here in the New York Times from earlier this year.

We should be pursuing removal of these two Justices from the bench, and we also should be pursuing adding a requirement that the Supreme Court abide by the same judicial rules of ethics as lower courts. This is not an unreasonable thing to request of the members of a body that have so much power; rather this should be mandated precisely because of the power and authority of the courts.

I adamantly believe that the right is correct in that Justice Kagan should be recusing herself from participating in the Supreme Court decision on the health care reform legislation that the right likes to call Obamacare. I will be surprised and disappointed if she does not do so; for her to participate would be very wrong.

But if both Justices Scalia and Thomas do NOT recuse themselves from participating in this SCOTUS decision, they should be removed from office for corruption.

Where the difference occurs is that Justice Kagan has a clear conflict of interest because of her role in the White House during the legislative process that produced the health care reform. She absolutely cannot be an impartial person in this matter.

But Thomas and Scalia have personally BENEFITED, materially and substantially from their relationships with one side of the case, prior to the matter coming before the court. And now apparently DURING the time the matter has come before the court as well; there is a clear bias on their parts as well as profit.

Read the story below; apparently these two conservative Justices no longer consider it worth their while to even pretend to be unbiased or impartial. Maybe they think the right is so used to crony capitalism, SuperPacs and dirty money, that no one will notice, or care. They are beyond shame.

They are wrong on both counts. It's time they were off the bench, in disgrace. That disgrace should be shared by the people and entities which were willing to behave unethically, and by the Presidents who nominated them for the Supreme Court.

The day the Supreme Court
gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive
question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

The occasion was last Thursday, when all nine justices met for a
conference to pore over the petitions for review. One of the cases at
issue was a suit brought by 26 states challenging the sweeping
healthcare overhaul passed by Congress last year, a law that has been a
rallying cry for conservative activists nationwide.

The justices agreed to hear the
suit; indeed, a landmark 5 1/2-hour argument is expected in March, and
the outcome is likely to further roil the 2012 presidential race, which
will be in full swing by the time the court’s decision is released.

The lawyer who will stand before the court and argue that the law
should be thrown out is likely to be Paul Clement, who served as U.S.
solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration.

Clement’s law firm, Bancroft PLLC, was one of almost two dozen firms
that helped sponsor the annual dinner of the Federalist Society, a
longstanding group dedicated to advocating conservative legal
principles. Another firm that sponsored the dinner, Jones Day,
represents one of the trade associations that challenged the law, the
National Federation of Independent Business.

Another sponsor
was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc, which has an enormous financial
stake in the outcome of the litigation. The dinner was held at a
Washington hotel hours after the court's conference over the case. In
attendance was, among others, Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and an avowed opponent of the healthcare law.

The featured guests at the dinner? Scalia and Thomas.

It’s nothing new: The two justices have been attending Federalist
Society events for years. And it’s nothing that runs afoul of ethics
rules. In fact, justices are exempt from the Code of Conduct that
governs the actions of lower federal judges.

If they were, they arguably fell under code’s Canon 4C, which states, “A
judge may attend fund-raising events of law-related and other
organizations although the judge may not be a speaker, a guest of honor,
or featured on the program of such an event.“

Nevertheless,
the sheer proximity of Scalia and Thomas to two of the law firms in the
case, as well as to a company with a massive financial interest, was
enough to alarm ethics-in-government activists.

Scalia and Thomas have
shown little regard for critics who say they too readily mix the
business of the court with agenda-driven groups such as the Federalist
Society. And Thomas’ wife, Ginni, is a high-profile conservative
activist.

Moreover, conservatives argue that it’s Justice Elena Kagan
who has an ethical issue, not Scalia and Thomas. Kagan served as
solicitor general in the Obama administration when the first legal
challenges to the law were brought at the trial court level. Her critics
have pushed for Kagan to recuse herself from hearing the case, saying
that she was too invested in defending the law then to be impartial now.
Kagan has given no indication she will do so.

I find the political right to be consistently and chronically dishonest on the subjects of the economy, the 1% of the wealthiest citizens, and especially on taxation issues.

The following is about a common right wing lie which always annoys me. Along with the
bullshit about not taxing the wealthy because they are 'job creators'
(they aren't, in fact they are routinely job exporters and job
destroyers) is the oft-repeated lie about small business and taxation.

I
would only add to the concluding statements at the end of this article
from Factcheck.org, that there are also other ways of structuring their
businesses which would allow small business owners to handle their
business taxation separately from their personal tax returns, and that
the conserns claimed by the right are easily remedied by a good tax
accountant or tax attorney.

Further, many if not most of those who
qualify as 'small business' are not small in the sense that most of us
use the word; some of those entities that qualify as 'small business' by
definition, are in fact HUGE operations, in terms of money, the dollar value of their commercial
activity, and number of locations and employees, and not what most of us
think of as 'small businesses' at all. It is how the right
disadvantages the 99% of us, while pandering to their 1% donor base
among the ultra-wealthy.

House Speaker John Boehner claimed that
“small-business people” make up more than half of those who would be
hit by a tax increase on “millionaires.” Not really. Only 13 percent of
those making over $1 million get even as much as one-fourth of that
income from small business, according to government tax experts.

Old Exaggerations

Republicans
have for years greatly exaggerated the extent to which higher taxes on
upper-income individuals would fall on owners of small businesses. And
we have repeatedlypointed out the inflated figures they’ve used in the past.
This time, Boehner was responding specifically to a question about a “millionaires” tax. The exchange was on ABC’s “This Week” on Nov. 6.

Christiane Amanpour: Some 75 percent of
Americans agree with an increase in tax on millionaires as a way to pay
for these jobs provisions. Do you not feel that by opposing it you’re
basically out of step with the American people on this issue?Boehner: Well, over half of the people who would be
taxed under this plan are, in fact, small-business people. And as a
result, you’re going to basically increase taxes on the very people that
we’re hoping will reinvest in our economy and create jobs. That’s the
real crux of the problem.

Boehner’s spokesman, Michael
Steel, quickly admitted that the speaker was mistaken. When we emailed
him asking for backup, he said: “He could have worded it better.”
But Steel then went on to repeat an older exaggeration — about a
different tax proposal. He said that “a tax increase on over $200/$250k
hits 50 percent of small-business income.” That’s not the tax proposal
Boehner was asked about. Furthermore, that old claim refers to half of
small-business income, not the number of “people,” the term
Boehner used. And even more important, a lot of that supposedly
“small”-business income is really from giant firms bringing in over $50
million a year.
Steel was referring to a July, 14, 2010, report
from the Joint Committee on Taxation that analyzed the effects of
President Barack Obama’s proposed 2011 budget, which, among other
things, called for allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for people
making over $200,000 (or for couples making over $250,000). And as we’ve
pointed out over and over, the JCT study doesn’t back up the claim
Steel and other Republicans constantly repeat, as the JCT itself made
very clear:

Joint Committee on Taxation: These figures
for net positive business income do not imply that all of the income
is from entities that might be considered ‘small.’ For example, in
2005, 12,862 S corporations and 6,658 partnerships had receipts on
more than $50 million.

‘Millionaire’ Small-Business Owners

But
what about the “millionaires” tax? Are half of the people making over
$1 million actually small-business owners? It so happens there was an in-depth report
that speaks to this very point, issued in August by experts at the
Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis. It is a “technical paper”
by career employees, not a policy document, and the most sophisticated
look at the issue that we’ve seen thus far.
This report notes that the definition of small-business owners that
Republicans have often used in the past is “overly broad,” which puts
it mildly. That definition counts as a small-business owner anyone who
reported any “flow-through” business income on his or her
personal tax return. So it takes in owners of large firms as well as
small, and also people whose business income is negligible and who earn
their living primarily from other means.
For example, a partner in a Wall Street hedge fund would be classified
as a “small”-business owner even if he or she raked in $100 million
from trading securities. And a corporate executive making $1 million
in salary and bonuses would be counted as a “small-business owner” if
he or she also received a few dollars from the incidental rental of a
ski condo or beach house.
That old, sweeping calculation was often the best government agencies
could do, but new data sources allowed the Treasury to take a more
precise and nuanced measure of small-business owners. The new Treasury
analysis improves on earlier efforts in two major ways:

It eliminates millions of “businesses” that don’t really have
any business activity (such as passive investment vehicles, or the
occasional rental of a vacation house).

It distinguishes businesses that aren’t really “small.” Only
businesses with less than $10 million in gross income or deductions are
counted as “small” in this analysis.

And what does that tell us about Boehner’s claim? He would be
correct only if we count as “small-business people” all those who get
any income at all from a business making less than $10 million. Under
that definition — which the Treasury paper calls “broad” — about
273,000 of these “millionaires” were classified as small-business
owners. That comes to about 70 percent of all “millionaire” returns.
By that measure, Boehner’s “over half” estimation would be correct
with plenty of room to spare. But for most of those taxpayers, the
small-business income is incidental.
The Treasury paper also supplied an alternative “narrow definition” of
small-business owners, counting “only individuals with active net
income from small businesses that equals at least 25 percent of the
taxpayers AGI [adjusted gross income].” That still includes a lot of
people who get the majority of their income from sources other than
their small-business income. But it gets us a lot closer to the
mom-and-pop small-business owner many of us envision when politicians
speak of “small-business people.”
And under this more precise measure, the millionaires’ picture changes
dramatically. Only 51,000 of the 392,000 millionaires were
small-business owners under this not-so-narrow definition. That comes to
about 13 percent. Nowhere close to half.
“We note that our revised methodology is but one reasonable approach
that could be used to identify small businesses and their owners,” the
report qualifies. “However, we believe it represents a significant
improvement over previous methodologies that were constrained by data
limitations.”

Job Creators?

Since Boehner argued the tax would hurt those who create jobs, here are two pieces of additional perspective from the report:

Small-business owners in general are often lauded as job
creators. But “millionaires” make up only a tiny fraction of the
small-business owners. How tiny a fraction? According to the Treasury
experts’ “broad” definition, 1.4 percent, and according to the narrow
definition, 0.5 percent.

And contrary to the “job creator” image, being a small-business
owner doesn’t mean you actually employ anyone. In fact, most don’t.
According to the Treasury report, “We also find that slightly more than
one-fifth of small businesses conform to our definition of an
employer.”

As we’ve always said, Republicans do have a point when they say
raising individual tax rates results in raising taxes on business owners
whose business income flows through to their personal returns. And
standard economic theory holds that raising business taxes tends to
dampen employment to some degree. But rather than stick to the facts,
Boehner and other Republicans exaggerate greatly the number of employers
who would be affected by raising taxes on upper-income individuals.– Robert Farley

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Republican Governor John Kasich had his butt handed to him on Tuesday.

Republicans overreach, they do it every time they win majorities in elections that they believe give them mandates, mandates which they mistake for support for right wing extremists. But after the 2010 elections, they outdid themselves.

Kasich, along with Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, were in the front of the right wing Union Busting, in the false name of making a friendly business climate in their states. Their careers and their 'centerpiece' legislation was heavily funded by the right, notably in some instances by the Koch Brothers directly and indirectly. Kasich is consistently noted along with Wisconsin Governor Walker (who has a 47% disapproval rating) and Florida Governor Rick Scott as the most unpopular governors in the nation. Walker faces a possible recall after only a year in office, despite attempts to change the recall process to save his job.

The numbers appear to indicate that more people voted to repeal Senate bill 5 than voted to elect Governor Kasich.

The legislation was repealed by a vote of 61% to 39%, by one report, while an AP source in Cleveland puts it at 63%. This is a landslide, this is overwhelming, in the face of yet more attempts at voter suppression by the right, and is more noteworthy than ever that this occurred in an off-year election, and was distinguished by unprecedented numbers of petition signatures to initiate the ballot initiative.

Along with this signal repeal were other significant elections rejecting the extremists on the right.

Remember all those claims by the right to justify their voter ID measures that they were only supporting fair and honest elections? In Ohio, as has been the case in other locations, the Right - funded apparently by the Koch Brothers - have engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to cheat to win elections. If they can't buy elections outright, they will try to buy elections through dirty tricks.

In Ohio, it failed. In Ohio, people won and big money lost. But in Ohio, despite the overwhelming numbers, the right wing extremists are staying bought by their wealthy would-be union-busting wealthy interests; they are going to attempt to RE-pass the same provisions of the legislation that was repealed as separate bills.

Just a hunch, but I'm betting that won't be a successful re-election strategy.

COLUMBUS - Republican Gov. John Kasich warned Democrats that they
needed to support a hard-edged anti-union law or get run over by “the
bus” — but on Tuesday Ohio voters left serious tread marks on Kasich
and, quite possibly, the national GOP.
Unions hung a humbling
defeat on Kasich, who has fast become his party’s poster boy for
conservative overreach, by rolling back Senate Bill 5, a new collective
bargaining law that bars public sector strikes, curtails bargaining
rights for 360,000 public employees and scraps binding arbitration of
management-labor disputes.

and this summed up the rejection by the center of the extremist right:

“Hey, I’m a Republican, but I’m telling you, Republican firefighters
and police officers aren’t going to be voting Republican around here for
a while,” said Doug Stern, a 15-year veteran of the Cincinnati fire
department who joined the non-partisan “We are Ohio” coalition that
helped repeal the bill.
“We’ll see what happens in 2012, but our guys have a long memory. We’re angry and disgusted.”

...one senior state Republican blamed the governor, whose approval
rating languishes in the low 30s, for “snatching defeat from the jaws of
victory” by alienating labor-friendly independents in the state.

Look for more posts later today about the dirty right wing political tricks of voter suppression. Look for more posts about OTHER elections, including unprecedented numbers of successful recall elections, notably the Republican President of the Arizona senate Russell Pearce and in Michigan, also in a recall election, Michigan State Representative Paul Scott was removed from office. In Virginia a recount will determine if their state senate will change to a Democratic majority; and in Iowa, the election of an Independent keeps their state senate in the hands of Democrats.

In an equally important rejection of an extremist right wing position, extremely conservative, extremely anti-abortion Mississippi overwhelmingly rejected the attempts to change the fundamental definition of personhood to conception, a position which has no scientific justification but is promoted by the extremists on the religious right. If this doesn't fly in Mississippi, where it appears to have been rejected by 55% of voters, it is not going to succeed ANYWHERE. This is going to pose a problem for many of the current crop of GOP Presidential candidate wannabees, who in an attempt to move further right in order to win primary support, have embraced that position. Look for a separate post on that in the near future.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

What is widely expected to be a referendum that will be a significant indicator for the 2012 elections, in Ohio they are voting on Senate Bill 5 (read the text here), relating to the rights of people to engage in collective bargaining -- in other words, unions. The Republicans in the legislature along with the governor, stripped those rights away, along partisan lines. Today, Issue 2 on the ballot (read the text here) could reverse that legislation, repealing it. If that happens, it is predicted that the gains made by the right in 2010 are likely to largely be reversed in 2012.

Ahead of the November 2012 elections, it could also be prophetic for the direction that recall next door in Wisconsin of Governor Walker.

One of my favorite sites, non partisan and factual, for following these elections and issues is of course Ballotnews, featured on our blog roll. Check them often; they are an excellent way to stay factually informed in a quick and easy and effective way.

While no election or referendum is over until the last voter casts their vote, and given that there have been numerous upsets and surprises in history, the following graph from the Ballotnews coverage of this issue strongly suggests that when it comes to Issue 2, repeal is more likely than it continuing:

Polls

The following is a line graph of poll results taken since April 2011.
The graph represents five polls taken throughout the course of the
year. All polls represented in the graph asked whether or not voters
supported or opposed Senate Bill 5. The average number of those surveyed
from all polls was 1,454 registered voters. The average margin of
error among those polls was +/- 2.6 percentage points.[1]

I look forward to seeing who is, in effect, going to be given a thumbs up or a thumbs down on this key issue. Watch this space for the Ballotnews updates as we get closer to the voting results being announced, complete with results analysis of what happened to union busting today in Ohio.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Planned Parenthood is under attack, nationally and here in Minnesota. The right-wingers like to malign it with factually inaccurate accusations. One example would be Michel Bachmann's fear-mongering that there was a danger of children being taken by school authorities to Planned Parenthood for abortions, and then getting on the school bus at the end of the day to go home as if nothing had occurred.

That Planned Parenthood lie by Bachmann was debunked pretty effectively. And we posted the debunking of the lie about Planned Parenthood told by Herman Cain repeatedly as well, here, citing the research into his statements by the excellent factcheck.org.

But in the face of the Eugenics / Involuntary sterilization controversy currently taking place in North Carolina, which you can read about, here, there has been a problem in the past, mostly from the 1920s through the 1970s that is currently center stage. There HAS been targeting of certain groups, which in North Carolina included a disproportionate number of blacks, for sterilization, not abortion. But clearly, sterilization DID disproportionately limit the number of black children being born.

So, what are the facts about black women and babies being targeted? You certainly will never hear the truth about it from any of the 2012 GOP Presidential contenders. In fact, there is seldom an accurate statement from any of them on the topic of sex, reproduction, gender orientation, or human sexuality.

But the North Carolina controversy DID make me curious about Eugenics programs in the state of Minnesota. Being fact-oriented and not factually challenged when it comes to facts relating to sex, gender, or sexuality, I did a little digging, as I am known to do from time to time.

What I found was this fascinating brief history of Eugenics in Minnesota at the Minnesota Historical Society's web site, where you can read more, here:

HISTORY TOPICS

Minnesota Eugenics Society & Founder Charles Fremont Dight

Eugenics
was a movement to improve the human species by controlling hereditary
factors in mating. The eugenics movement began in the late 1800s in
Britain. Francis Galton, an English scientist, coined the term in 1883
and founded the Eugenics Society of Great Britain in 1908. Galton’s
philosophy was that humanity could be improved by encouraging the ablest
and healthiest people to have more children. Galton’s vision of
eugenics is usually termed “positive eugenics.” The eugenics movements
in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia favored “negative
eugenics,” which advocated preventing the least able from breeding. The
American Eugenics Society was organized in 1926.In the early 1920s, Charles Fremont Dight, a physician in Minneapolis,
launched a crusade to bring the eugenics movement to Minnesota. He
combined the moral philosophy of eugenics with socialism and espoused
the idea that the state should administer reproduction of mentally
handicapped individuals. His main lines of approach included eugenics
education, changes in marriage laws, and the segregation and
sterilization of what he called “defective” individuals.Dight organized the Minnesota Eugenics Society in 1923 and began
campaigning for a sterilization law. In 1925 the Minnesota legislature
passed a law allowing the sterilization of the “feeble–minded” and
insane who were resident in the state's institutions. For the next
several legislative sessions Dight fought unsuccessfully for expansion
of the law to include sterilization of the “unfit” who lived outside of
institutions.Dight continued his legislative efforts as late as 1935. He spoke and
wrote on the subject of eugenics, including over 300 letters to
Minneapolis daily newspapers, a 1935 pamphlet on the History and Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement for Human Betterment in Minnesota, and a 1936 book entitled Call for a New Social Order.
In 1933 he sent a letter to Adolph Hitler and included with it one of
his letters to the editor in which he commended Hitler's work in
Germany.The Minnesota Eugenics Society became moribund by the early 1930s. Dight
died on June 20, 1938, in Minneapolis. He left his estate to the
University of Minnesota to found what became the Dight Institute for the
promotion of Human Genetics.

That made me even more curious; a doctoral dissertation Neal Ross Holtan, from earlier this year on the history of eugenics and the U of MN put the end of the Dight institute at 1988 when it became the Institute for Human Genetics, not the 1960s, as stated in an MPR article from August 2011. That places our eugenics history a couple of decades more recent, if relatively inactive for sterilization during those later years.

Number of victimsIn total, there were 2,350 victims of sterilization in Minnesota.
Of the 2,350, 519 were male, and 1,831 (approx. 78%) were female. About
18% were deemed mentally ill and 82% mentally deficient. The
sterilizations in Minnesota accounted for 4 percent of all the
sterilizations in the nation (Lombardo, p. 118). Period during which sterilizations occurredThe sterilizations took place predominantly between 1928 and the late
1950s. Sterilizations were relatively high in the 1930s and early
1940s (Paul, p. 393). During the war, there was a shortage of
staff, which may be the reason why there were fewer sterilizations from
1942 to 1946 (Paul, p. 396).

And there were several sources which identify Minnesota as having been one of, if not the most, eugenics conscious states in the U.S. What I haven't found yet is if the law passed in the first part of the 20th century has been repealed, or if court decisions have simply made it no longer applicable.......or if its provisions have been replaced by other legislation.

Bachmann is that the claims about Planned Parenthood appear to play on the abuses of eugenics sterilization as part of their fear mongering repressive and regressive policies towards sex and reproduction, and especially wrong and bad in the policies they advocate for the terrible failure, abstinence only sex education.

I knew that in some other states, right wing sex paranoia took forms like banning sex toys including vibrators, and that Minnesota had at one time enforced draconian sodomy laws until they were overturned by our State Supreme Court. What I did not know though turned up in this article, from of all places, that right wing bastion of propaganda, Fox News (you can read the whole article, here):

"Outdated, unthinkable, erotophobic and downright ridiculous, we
should thank our lucky stars that enforcing them is another matter.Sex toys are banned in some states, such as Alabama. Sexual
intercourse between unmarried couples is illegal in Georgia. Flirting is
banned in San Antonio, Texas. Oral sex is banned in Indiana. Anal
intercourse is banned in Cincinnati, Ohio.Sexual positions beyond missionary are illegal in Washington, D.C. Sleeping naked is illegal in Minnesota."

When I hear Herman Cain, or Michele Bachmann whinging on trying to propagandize culture war issues relating to sex, it seems to me that at least as regards abortion, they are playing on our real history, as a state, and as a nation, of eugenics abuses. In Minnesota, we turned Eugenics into a study of Genetics, something which empowers people. If we listen to Cain or Bachmann, and follow their recommendations, we might as well return to that inglorious, backwards and fearful era of another century. I for one have no desire to return to a right wing dark ages of human sexuality. Part of pushing back against that right wing fear mongering about abortion targeting blacks and Planned Parenthood being racist is to know our factual history, to recognize the false conflating of abortion and sterilization in the face of right wing fraud.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Recently, a vile man (sorry, but his comments define him as nothing less) decided the proper course of action in reacting to a comment he didn't like (and admittedly, the comment was mildly demeaning), well, he decided the proper course of action was to engage in speech which any of us, standing on a street corner and hearing, would make us think the man was unhinged, vulgar, and disgusting.

That sort of speech isn't tolerated, obviously not here, but it isn't tolerated really anywhere by ordinary citizens. That isn't to say we deny the person the right to say them in public, far from it, but rather that react viscerally to such speech and call the person out for being precisely what they are, bigoted, hateful, and behaving in a way which calls into question everything they say. That is the normal reaction, and has been, to this kind of person, since the founding of our country. Someone who stood upon a soap box and claimed that they were allowed to kill anyone they desired, that women should be whipped regularly, that rape was merely the improper denial by a woman of any man's sexual rights, we looked at as someone not deserving of our respect or time.

Such was the conduct of Serr8d. This man followed folks from blog to blog to assert that he, and he alone, knows the mind of God. That he, and he alone, can decide what his rights are, and that he alone is so smart that he, and he alone understands what rights are "his" and which rights he reserves to himself, but he can otherwise take away from others. Any disagreement is met with prurient, recommendations of sexual violence, quite frankly suggesting someone who has repressed issues with sexual liberty and dealings with the opposite sex. He goes on to threaten with real violence anyone who disagrees. It is his right, or so he claims, to attempt to deny others a right of speech he claims is God given to him, but apparently not to anyone he doesn't agree with. Apparently, God has said he (Serr8d) should go and take those rights away from others if they aren't preaching the "proper" word, a word which only Serr8d understands (how convenient).

In the past we have correctly deemed such people to be at best "off kilter" and at worst, dangerous, not dangerous like an Army Ranger (i.e. tough, well-trained), but dangerous like David Koresh, or the Reverend Jim Jones - dangerous claimants of divine authority, dangerous in that they may act out violently, not only because they claim that ONLY THEY know the truth (so who can argue with them or stop them?), but also because they are liable to act utterly inappropriately, failing to apply proportion to their acts. They seek, like Eric William Rudolph, some sort of pseudo-moral outcome (the end of abortion), but their steps in achieving such outcomes are morally outrageous and hypocritical (he blew up buildings, killed innocent people). They claim to be on a "mission from God" so their mission justifies their acts, in short, they are on their own little "Jihad."

The bottom line is that it is people like this who society again needs to "walk on the other side of the street" from, we need to call the likes of Strom Thurmond (who openly advocated racism) out, we need to start to reply and denounce the extremist, intolerant, "God filled" voices who espouse a word which is neither pious, loving nor moral - and we need to do so in ways which drives these nut-cases either back into the dark closet created during their own tragic childhoods from when they've sprung, or requires them to seek true engagement and moreover, to use proportion and decency in dealing with others. We don't shoot people for jaywalking, we don't blow them up for worshiping a god we don't believe in, and we sure as heck don't engage in threats of violence, and use images of rape in response to being accused of being hateful. Not only have we stepped over the line into the "insane", we've proven the person right.

Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States

August 2011

INCIDENCE OF ABORTION

• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 67% among blacks and 53% among Hispanics are unintended.[1]
In 2008, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million
in 2000. However, between 2005 and 2008, the long-term decline in
abortions stalled. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal
abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, two percent of women aged 15–44 have an abortion. Half have had at least one previous abortion.[2,3]
• At least half of American women will experience an unintended
pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, one in 10 women will have an
abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.[4,5]

However, Cain is not the only prominent figure on the right to repeat these lies.

Only Cain himself can know if he sincerely believes these lies. Whether he believes them, or as he has demonstrated on a number of occasions --- like his foreign policy statement about China intending to become a nuclear power, which they did decades ago back in 1964, or his misinformation about homosexuality as a choice - he is simply Michele Bachmann-like sloppy about facts, the result is to create racially based ill will where there is no valid basis to do so.

We should not be demonizing Planned Parenthood. we should instead be helping to provide women with effective contraception, and the education to use it consistently to find better alternatives to control their reproductive decisions and their reproductive health.

Herman Cain seems to be playing the so-called 'race card' here, and it seems to be the Joker - the trickster, the dishonesty card.

If he gets this kind of thing wrong, and so many other items of information wrong, how can he presume to be qualified to serve as President? How can any of the candidates currently in contention for the GOP nomination?

Cain’s False Attack on Planned Parenthood

Posted onNovember 1, 2011

Herman
Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that
Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being
born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the
organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but
there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of
U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of
residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
The GOP presidential candidate made these comments back in March,
telling an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that
“[w]hen Margaret Sanger — check my history — started Planned Parenthood,
the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities
so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”
He called it “planned genocide.”
In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 30, Cain did not back down from those allegations. Here’s his exchange with host Bob Schieffer:

Schieffer: … you said that it was not
Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide because you said
Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the black
communities because they wanted to kill black babies –Herman Cain: Yes.Scheiffer: — before they were born. Do you still stand by that?Cain: I still stand by that.Schieffer: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?Cain: If people go back and look at the history and
look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came
from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history —
secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those
facilities were built in the black community — and Margaret Sanger’s own
words, she didn’t use the word “genocide,” but she did talk about
preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by
preventing black babies from being born.

Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search
and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial
comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored
something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its
head.
Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth
control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in
Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to
black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.”
Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that
she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to
gain the trust of the community:

Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is
also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to
our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to
go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister
is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of
their more rebellious members.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose,
that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t
say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says
that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of
context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized
elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro
Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south,
unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the
Project had a humanitarian aim.”
It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The
project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black
leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried
to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the
implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Friday, November 4, 2011

I
am making the decision to now more stringently enforce the ban on Ser8d
from commenting here. This is in response to extremely offensive
comments on Penigma, my 'home' blog where he followed me from posting
and commenting on another blog where I write.

I believe his comments are not only offensive, but
can be reasonably construed as sexual harassment. It does not appear
that I am the only person he has followed back to their own blogs to
behave abusively or offensively.

Therefore I will also be filing a
complaint with the people at Google who operate the blog.spot / blogger
platform to file a complaint for violating their terms of service, and with his IP. If
Ser8d does not abide by the ban, and continues, I will take the next
step of following up with a police complaint. It is my understanding
that the authorities are quite efficient in working with their
counterparts in the jurisdiction of the offending poster/commenter, and
that they are quite capable of identifying that person, their location,
and address.

I will not repeat the comment itself here, but our
stat-counter service on Penigma shows the following information,
redacted so as not to publish private personal information here, in
compliance with the terms of service agreement.

Harassing me, harassing any of our commenters, is unacceptable conduct.

Don't come back.

If I see you are visiting this blog, by way of the stat counter service or if I have any other reason to believe you are doing so, I will again contact both google/blogger/blogspot, and the police and put the matter in their hands and in the hands of your internet service provider.It is regrettable that you cannot conduct yourself appropriately under the terms of service, and the posted blog rules, but clearly you lack the judgment and self control to do so.

Sex assault arrest highlights security concerns at 'Occupy' protests

By Miranda Leitsinger, Senior Writer and Editor, msnbc.com

NEW
YORK -- Highlighting growing security concerns at “Occupy” protests
around the country, a 26-year-old man has been arrested and charged with
sexual abuse of a woman at the encampment near Wall Street where the
movement was born.
Tonye Iketubosin, a Brooklyn resident, was
arrested late Tuesday and remained in custody Wednesday while the
incident was investigated, police said. He had been working in the
encampment's kitchen.
The Wall Street Journal reported that
police were investigating an alleged attack by Iketubosin on an
18-year-old woman from Massachusetts. The woman told police she accepted
his offer to let her sleep in his tent while he went to work at the
kitchen early Saturday, but later returned and raped her, the newspaper
quoted an unidentified law enforcement official as saying. Charges were
pending.
Iketubosin allegedly groped a 17-year-old woman days
before that incident, on Oct. 24. He has been charged with third-degree
sexual abuse in that case, the newspaper reported.
Brendan Burke,
41, of Brooklyn, who helped start the “Occupy Wall Street” security
team, said there had been three or four assaults since the protest began
on Sept. 17 committed by two men.
In such cases, he said, protesters “go straight to the police.”
Burke
said the security team, which consists of up to ten members and has
help from outside groups to help keep the site safe, has non-violent
measures for handling aggressors, including encircling them and shouting
them down. A community watch group, akin to neighborhood watch, also
monitors the site overnight, he said.
“People forget this is the
middle of the street,” Burke said. “All walks of life are in here, so
it’s not like a bunch of crazy people are in this park. But there is an
element in this park that is eating free food, living in tents and being
subsidized by the movement. It’s one of the weak parts of the movement,
but it’s changing. … It’s just a thing everyone’s working out as we go
along.”
He said the protesters attempt to integrate such interlopers into the movement when possible.
“We have also a track record of including troubled kids into the fray of working groups … and becoming part of the movement,” he said.Protesters find allies in ranks of the wealthy
Security issues have bubbled up at some “Occupy” sites around the country in recent weeks.
“Occupy Boston” is looking at measures to deal with taking
troublemakers out of the camp, protester Ravi Mishra, 25, said Tuesday.
There have been no reports of sexual assault, though they have had to
deal with people who are rowdy, drunk or have substance abuse problems,
he said.
Some people who were not really a part of the movement have shown up and gotten “up to no good,” Mishra said.
“We’re
doing our best to navigate, you know, both sides of the line,” he said.
“On the one hand, we want to make sure that we’re not being exclusive
by any means, on the other hand, we do understand that there is ... a
degree of realism that we have to take with these issues.”Old guard back in the trenches at "Occupy" protests
“Occupy
Dallas” also has had a few security issues arise with people coming to
the camp who were not associated with the movement, protester Michael
Prestonise wrote in an email.
“Our position is one that might run
counter to the continued accusations of our movement primarily
consisting of hippies and freeloaders,” he said. “We actively work with
the police to enforce the law.”
Prestonise said the protesters
had dealt with theft by announcing stolen items at “general assemblies”
and conducted their own investigations in some cases. A fire watch team
also coordinates security and organizes shifts to maintain an all-night
safety patrol, he said.
Both Occupy Boston and Wall Street have
tents for women only. Burke said the camp is safe, but people should not
think it’s a crime-free zone.
“There’s a myth about this … that
it’s not every day America,” Burke said. “We’re just Americans doing our
constitutional right. It doesn’t mean that there is a magic spell that
will protect you from crime.”

Turning up the heat on right wing lies

Opinions

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

― Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance," Newsweek (Jan. 1980)

We stand with PP

past wisdom

"I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."Billy Graham - Parade (1 February 1981)

An astute observation from Bertrand Russell

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

Penigma is pro-feminism, pro-thought

Ignorance is a choice

Just Do it!

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